 Hi, from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2016. Brought to you by Red Hat. Now, here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. Welcome back to day three coverage of Red Hat Summit 2016. You're watching theCUBE, this SiliconANGLE Media flagship program. Go out to all the shows, help extract the signal from the noise. Here at Red Hat Summit, over 5,300 people from around the globe and the keynote this morning, happy to have on the speaker, Tom Sodastrom, who's the IT Chief Technology and Innovation Officer from the Jet Propulsion Lab or JPL. Talked about open source even, beyond the terra firmer here on Earth. So, Tom, thanks so much for joining us and thanks for a great keynote this morning. Thank you, thank you for caring about space and that's really what this is all about, us working together to advance humanity's journey into space. Those of us in the technology industry, it's something I think we all roll around, it's something that if you're excited about technology, NASA, Jet Propulsion Lab, there's so much innovation over the decades that come there. Explain to our audience kind of your role there and what your work does. So, I'm in IT. Our role really is to make, give the tools, the latest tools, the latest capability to the smart engineers and scientists who put rovers on Mars, who finds Earth 2.0, who discovers life out there, who helps us one day redirect an asteroid from not hitting us, that type of thing. So, we want them to have their really information workers so they should have access to the latest information at any time, which often starts as toys. So, where are the disruptors coming? And then we prototype them. We figured out here is the next IT disruptor for the next IT decade. So, how long is an IT decade? About three years. Three years, you did listen. Three years, we can get our arms around, right? So, cloud computing eight years ago was an experiment. And we saw it as a disruptor. It was a disruptor. But if you can see a disruptor coming early, you can get advantage of using those toys. Cloud was somewhere you backed up your music to eight years ago. Now, it's where we put all of our data, most of our data and processing. And also, if we're early, this is the key, we can work with the innovative vendors and other innovators to shape it in such a way that we can use it. And if we can use it at JPL and NASA, then the government can use it. So, everybody wins. Yeah, can you speak to kind of the partnership you have between what technologies created in-house versus your private industry and the vendor ecosystem? Sure. And we're learning as we go. One of the key things that we are all about is rapid experimentation. You won't know until you try it and you see it and you hold it in your hand. So, we are, for instance, we were very early with Cloud Brokering. We wanted to have multiple clouds and wanted to go between them. So, it didn't exist. So, we wrote software to do Cloud Brokering. After a few years, we said, you know, this is not really the software we should be writing. Surely industry is doing it by now. But it wasn't there yet. So, we pulled the trigger a little too early. So, what we wanna do is partner with industry and say, okay, here's the capabilities that we care about. So, we prototyped with our data. So, I demonstrated some internet of things. Is it a toy? Absolutely. Is it a security problem? Yeah. Is it insurmountable? No, not at all. Because is it valuable? We believe it is. We believe it's extremely valuable. So, here's an opportunity. We have written some software. You can talk to your systems. We used Amazon's Alexa because that's what's available now at Go. We use Samsung lights. We use Intel RealSense. Anything that's inexpensive and consumer grade, can we use it in our environment? And we write software to fit the use case. Then we hope that everybody else will innovate and take that software and make it better so that we can use it to put more rovers on Mars and do all those other things. So, that's really, it's this open power of participation. We wanna get our use case out there. If we could put all of our data in the cloud, where, and we're talking lots of data, what everybody could participate on it, and not just a single hackathon, but an ongoing open source type development, that would help everybody. Yeah, I have to imagine, you know, let's say go back eight years when you said cloud was sort of a toy and you mentioned a lot of what you do. You kind of have to start by considering it a toy because you don't know if it's gonna be. That's right. But it sounds like the entry point has come down so much more because of open source software, because of the functionality in consumer grade things. That's got to help as you're going to your management and saying like, look, we're spending tax dollars, people are conscious about that, we've got budgets, we're conscious about that. How much has that changed in terms of an experiment or a toy being cost effective and you having to justify it and going, you know what, there really aren't huge barriers. It's more a barrier of what's possible, what you can think about. It's a very perceptive question because the barrier has come down. But the barrier to cloud at the time really wasn't money. It didn't cost much to experiment. The barrier was what data can we put out there? And realizing that one size does not fit all, Jim Rinaldi is the CIOH APL, my boss. He coined the term chaotic architecture and it sounds controversial and hopefully it is. Because the enterprise architecture, you think of the box and how do you fit in it? Chaotic architecture, you know all the pieces will move and change and you got to experiment your way through it. But you know it will change. So you have an architecture for that. So as the, we have something we call an IT petting zoom. So the idea is that people can try it in their own use case and evolve it. We have an innovation experience center where we can take these use cases. It's got to start with something that's going to add value or problem to solve. We put it up in on the walls or gestures or lights or speak to it. And then people come in and look at it. So it's where you go in to experience the future today. And if it matters, we continue. If it doesn't, we drop it. So it's all about people adopting it and trying it. Again, if they don't see any value, we'll discover it real fast. The other thing we know is if we can even dream of it, they will improve the heck out of it. And that's the point. Both at JPL at NASA, but also the world now. The NASA, the recent NASA space app challenge hackathon. Over 15,000 people working on NASA problems over one weekend. It was fantastic. So you talked about just how much massive amounts of data you have. I know you've got a data science team. How do you look at kind of the sharing of information and accessing both your data and other sources of data and mash all those together? So I think I'm going to tie the two questions together. Because how do you experiment with big data? Does big data mean big budgets? No. Was big data overhyped? Oh, yeah. Which is a good thing. For us, the more hyped, the better. Because it means venture capital will flow into it. People will care. We saw big data coming about five years ago. Realized that we really needed our data scientists to do something with it. And we came up with an approach we called question farming, where you take very low hanging tree approach. What could you solve? What could you visualize? So visual analytics. So you just kind of ask the question, visualize that result, iterate on it until you get to the real question. And then you can continue on that. So big data is really not just huge amounts of data, but it's the different types of unstructured data. Now video is data, audio is data, pictures are data. So in the end, we, for instance, all the videos we take inside JPL, something called JPL2, we transcribe automatically in the cloud. So that you can just search for the words and it finds it in whatever media it is. Whether pictures, PowerPoints, web pages, et cetera. That's big data. The way we did that was to use open source technology and cloud computing to iterate very quickly, very inexpensively. And we don't have to invent all of it anymore. On the contrary, we'd much rather just be smart users than smart creators of consumer technology. JPL obviously has a mission, explore space, but there was a whole generation of kids that got inspired by the Moon launch, by the space shuttle, and now by the Mars rover. Do you guys wake up in the morning sometimes and feel like you've got a second mission, which is to inspire that next generation of engineers, that next generation of curiosity, because you can sort of showcase a lighthouse of what's possible? We wake up every morning thinking of that because it is about inspiring. Because really, in the end, it's about all of humanity. Should we one day have to vacate Earth, be a nice place to have somewhere to go to, and that's what Kepler is all about, finding exoplanets, and on and on and on. So the next generation of explorers, they're really smart kids. We have something like 700 interns coming in every summer at JPL, and they do amazing things. So if we can mentor them with the more experienced engineers, and it's actually two-way mentoring. The more experienced engineers see the new ways of working, and the kids, if I can call them that, and I can't because I'm old, see what they do and can apply it as quickly as possible to a real space mission, then we are where we need to be. Now, inspiring the kids to come and work at JPL and NASA is one thing. Inspiring the rest of the world to participate in that journey is really key, and that's what I think the next generation is. Whitehurst called it the fourth industrial revolution of the openness and sharing. I think he's right, and that's how do we participate in that journey? So what kind of connections do you have with some of the private space organizations, like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the like? I'm often asked, is it competition? No, it's great. It generates the commercial space industry, generates more interest in space. More interest in space, it generates more investment in space. And the Martian movie has been great for us, where it generates interest, and interest is something that is going to help us in our mission, because we are taxpayer funded, so it's got to be used that money wisely and spend more money on science and engineering, less on IT, and that's still enabled those people, and that's what it's all about. You have to save that money in case you need a billion dollars to save Matt Damon as well. Exactly. Again, what a great movie. You talked about a project about exploring Jupiter at the end of the keynote. Give us a little bit of detail around that, and you said there's going to be an event and a hackathon around trying to collaborate. Yeah, tell us about that. Amazingly, happens, statistically, a scientist has to look into it, happens on 4th of July. Don't know how that happens. But on 4th of July at 8.53 p.m. Pacific time, Juno, which is a big spacecraft, launched five years ago, it takes that long to get to Jupiter, it's going to go into orbit around Jupiter, and to do that, it needs to slow itself down by 1200 miles per hour in 35 minutes. At that point, it's slow enough to be grabbed by Jupiter's gravity, which is pretty immense gravity. It's a giant gas planet, and it will spend the next 20 months really skimming the cloud tops and trying to understand what Jupiter is made out of, the inside of it. It is such a huge impact on the rest of our solar system, by far the biggest planet. So, how can the public participate? Certainly watch NASA TV, JPL website, NASA website. Also, there will be a way of participating. So if you search for JunoCam on the web, you'll find a way where the public can pick which pictures to see, which should be, how do they process, and participate, become citizen scientists. There's also a way of riding along with Juno on a game, as it approaches this, hopefully, very successful event. But it's not easy, it's a scary time. Anytime we do something like that, it's scary, because it's never been done before, every time. Are there many of the kind of crowd sourcing engagements that you leverage, to kind of leverage technology and the masses to solve problems? We will do more and more of that. We do a lot of hackathons, and we do hackathons internally now, to get the power of participation from our internal members. We share code just the way open source does, inside and outside. I think we've been very successful with hackathons. It's a one-time event. You create something, you have a problem, you solve it. I don't think, and this is my opinion, maybe wrong, that we're very successful in having an ongoing hackathon that keeps solving a problem. Kind of like local motors did, when they actually crowdsourced the car and the car is out there driving. Somebody did the steering wheel, somebody did the wheels, et cetera, et cetera. And it all came together. I think that's the next barrier for us. And I think the cloud will have everything to do with it, because there will be a place to play. Yeah. You mentioned gaming. Everybody sort of loves gaming. They're now fascinated by virtual reality. We were talking off camera. You said you've got a part of what you're doing that's experimenting with virtual reality. How are people gonna be able to experience space through virtual reality? There's a lot. I would say the easiest, when you don't know what you do, you search. So search for JPL and gaming. Search for JPL and HoloLens in particular. Search for NASA and those same things. And you see lots and lots of games. One of the more exciting ones now is virtual reality. Augmented reality where you can have Microsoft's HoloLens and you can participate in the JPLers are exploring Mars using worth augmented reality or immersive reality. So they are actually on Mars looking at these rocks because we have the pictures and they can see how is the rover gonna go around it and it's like being there. It was an excellent TED talk on that. Guy named Jeff Norris at JPL was part of it, came in virtually. That's a fun one. You'll see that and you go, really? But it works. And then of course all the games that you can run download at home. One is called Spacecraft 3D where you can just use your Android or iPhone and look at follow along with I think there's like 20 spacecraft there now and you can take pictures with them. It's great for kids, great for education and outreach. Then the next generation is the maker movement. That's really exciting because we have software and hardware playing together, building things, driving them. It's Raspberry Pi's, it's Arduino's, it's little bits, it's all of those things together. We're experimenting a lot with that and driving them by speaking to them. You can ask questions about them, that's coming soon. We'll just be able to send a 3D printer into space and it'll take care of everything. So actually we looked at that. How do you prepare Mars for humans? Maybe you send a 3D printer and the 3D printer could then take the regolith of the soil and build bricks out of it, build a home that protects them from solar radiation. Will that happen? I don't know, but it's doable. They'll be in Martian too. Matt Damon will be there to save the 3D printer. Absolutely, we'll send Ben Affleck with him this time. So Tom, I want to give you the last word. We covered a lot of pieces. What are some of those, as you say, toys today that you think hold a great promise to be the tools for innovation in the future? I think if you think about how we interact with computing, so you can use to be able to click it, you use to be able to type it, now you can swipe it, you can approach it, you can blink it, soon we'll be able to think it. So the brain wave, there's a lot of things coming there. Multiple senses interacting with it. If you could look at a display and say, zoom in on this, or how am I trending? All of that is within our fingertips. I think the augmented reality, I think the cloud computing next generation, especially serverless computing that's coming, is interesting. IoT, absolutely, very interesting. Where you have sensors, very inexpensive sensors, and you can interact with them to sense anything. And of course, it generates big data, so analytics is the other one. We're very good at visual analytics, and we are getting good at machine learning and things like that. So it's the predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics that's coming next. I think those are probably the key, and also evolving to how we work. So we work more like a startup in the future. That's my opinion. Tom Soderstrom with Jet Propulsion Lab. Really appreciate you sharing with our audience everything that's happening. Really exciting stuff. We'll be back with lots more coverage here for Red Hat Summit 2016. You're watching theCUBE. Thank you.